Unprotecting American Lands: How Trump Is Dismantling America’s Bipartisan Conservation Legacy

America has a deep, bipartisan track record of conserving its lands, waters, and wildlife. From President Theodore Roosevelt’s establishment of national parks and monuments to congressional legislation such as the Wilderness Act and Endangered Species Act (ESA), the United States has set itself apart as a global conservation leader. Yet as the country marks its 250th anniversary, this legacy is being dismantled and erased. Despite attempts by his own administration to compare him to “Conservation President” Roosevelt, President Donald Trump has proved to be the most anti-nature president in the country’s history.

Analysis by the Center for American Progress finds that, across his two terms, President Trump has been responsible for removing protections from more than 100 million acres of public lands, rolling back safeguards on more than 86 million acres less than two years into his second term. In addition to slashing conservation agencies’ funding and purging land management jobs, President Trump is putting beloved public lands and waters across the country—and America’s conservation legacy—at risk of being permanently altered or destroyed.

The Trump administration is rolling back key protections

Despite the deep popularity of conservation policies and protected public lands, President Trump has initiated a systematic elimination of hard-won protections for public lands and waters. New analysis by the Center for American Progress has found that since January 2025, the Trump administration has acted to collectively eliminate protections from more than 86 million acres of U.S. public lands—an area equivalent to more than 70 Grand Canyons or 38 Yellowstone National Parks. These rollbacks have wide-ranging consequences: opening up pristine forest wilderness to development, exposing Alaska’s habitat-rich landscapes to oil drilling, putting beloved sites such as Minnesota’s Boundary Waters at risk of contamination and destruction, and more.

In addition to rolling back critical place-based protections, the Trump administration has also taken action to weaken conservation and habitat protections across all public lands. The administration’s moves to expand extractive development on public lands include rescinding the Public Lands Rule, prioritizing mineral development above other land uses, and implementing the Big Beautiful Bill’s mandatory lease sales across the West and Alaska. The administration has also hamstrung the ESA by eliminating its definition of “harm,” thereby weakening protections for an additional 87 million acres of habitat across the country.

Roadless Rule

The 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, known as the “Roadless Rule,” has historically protected intact blocks of national forest lands across the country from road construction, timber harvesting, and other development. But in June 2025, the Department of Agriculture announced the repeal of the rule, eliminating protections from nearly 40 million acres of ecologically important forest. This decision would affect more than 25,000 miles of trails and other recreational opportunities, threaten wildlife habitat, and put millions of Americans’ drinking water at risk. The repeal of the Roadless Rule is deeply unpopular: More than 200,000 comments were submitted in opposition to the rollback during the 21-day comment period. Yet despite this public backlash, the Trump administration is moving forward with this action, and a proposed rule is currently under review by the White House.

Alaska’s special places

Alaska is home to the most remote and untouched wild areas in the entire country. But their pristine status is now at risk as the Trump administration removes protections from millions of acres of protected public lands across the state.

In June 2025, Trump’s Department of the Interior (DOI) removed the rule that safeguarded critical habitats and culturally significant lands in National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, in the Western Arctic. DOI subsequently put 5.5 million acres up for auction, exposing the area to oil and gas development that could threaten caribou, polar bears, beluga whales, and the more than 40 Alaska Native communities that rely on the land for subsistence. DOI is now moving to expedite permitting in the reserve by granting blanket approvals of environmental review, removing the requirement to consider the environmental impacts of new development in the area. While not counted in the acreage totals above because protections were initially removed during Trump’s first term, the administration is also rushing forward with reckless oil and gas leasing in the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Elsewhere in Alaska, protections for 28 million acres of ecologically and culturally significant public lands—known as “D-1” lands—are also being targeted by the Trump administration. The D-1 public lands are home to vulnerable caribou herds, the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, and other key wildlife populations. These landscapes are also vital for Alaska’s Tribal population: About 80 percent of Alaska Native villages are located within 50 miles of protected D-1 lands and rely on them and their wildlife for subsistence hunting and fishing. The Trump administration is disregarding significant environmental consequences, as well as formal requests by the majority of the Alaska Native Tribes to protect these lands.

Resource management plans (RMP)

President Trump also signed legislation overturning four public lands management plans, including protections for ecologically and culturally significant areas in Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Those actions stripped commonsense protections and conservation status from unique recreation opportunities, wildlife migration corridors, and beloved landscapes. To pass the highly damaging and partisan legislation, the administration’s allies in Congress turned to a tactic never previously used to overturn a public lands management plan: abusing what’s known as the Congressional Review Act (CRA). Filing a resolution under the CRA allowed them to avoid normal Senate rules to overturn these management plans, setting a dangerous precedent that jeopardizes the responsible management of hundreds of millions of acres of public lands.

Outside of the CRA process, the Trump administration is also administratively unwinding protections from another completed RMP in Wyoming.

Mineral withdrawals

Some of the most beloved areas in Minnesota, New Mexico, and Nevada are now at risk of destructive mining after the Trump administration moved to overturn rules that withdrew lands from mineral development. Those protections—known as withdrawals—were previously established in response to sustained advocacy to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of land from destructive mining.

These areas are invaluable:

• In Minnesota, the Boundary Waters watershed surrounds the country’s most-visited wilderness area and is a beloved place for camping, hiking, kayaking, and stargazing.
• The Upper Pecos River in New Mexico, part of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers System, not only provides vital habitat for at-risk wildlife but is also culturally significant to the Jemez and Tesuque Pueblo peoples.
• Chaco Canyon in New Mexico is home to more than 4,700 archaeological sites and a millennium’s worth of cultural history.
• Nevada’s Ruby Mountains are home to iconic wildlife, including the state’s largest mule deer herd.

While the fights to protect Chaco Canyon and the Ruby Mountains are still ongoing, President Trump has already rescinded the Pecos withdrawal and signed a bill into law that overturns the Boundary Waters withdrawal and opens the area up to mineral development.

Other anticonservation actions

In addition to directly rolling back protections, the Trump administration has taken action to weaken conservation policies while strengthening federal support for the reckless extraction of natural resources. In May 2025, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced the rescission of the Public Lands Rule, which put conservation on equal footing with other management priorities across all of BLM’s 245 million acres of lands. Repealing this important regulation will deprioritize conservation in favor of extractive development—a decision further worsened by President Trump’s executive order to prioritize mining above all other uses of public lands. In addition, the administration is holding massive lease sales that expose millions of acres of public lands, including sensitive lands and recreation destinations, to destructive drilling and mining.

Most recently, DOI initiated a review of long-standing wildlands policies, and the Forest Service is reportedly planning to weaken protections for “recommended wilderness,” which means new, broadscale attacks on public land protections may be coming very soon. And the Trump administration is rolling back protections for not only public lands, but public waters, too. In June 2026, President Trump issued an executive order to roll back protections for the three remaining Pacific Ocean national monuments, opening up more than 300 million acres to commercial fishing.

How Trump’s conservation legacy stacks up to Roosevelt’s

Members of the Trump administration have made the point on numerous occasions to publicly admire President Theodore Roosevelt’s conservation legacy and have even compared Trump to Roosevelt, who conserved nearly 230 million acres of public lands while in office. Areas protected under Roosevelt include national forests, national monuments, national parks, and bird and game reserves.

A 2025 White House fact sheet claimed that Trump is engaging in conservation work that “will build on the legacy of conservative conservationists like President Teddy Roosevelt and protect our Nation’s natural treasures.” Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has long  praised Roosevelt’s leadership, has also compared Trump’s track record with former President Roosevelt’s conservation legacy. But the impending July 4 opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library should be an occasion to scrutinize this comparison more closely.

Despite the stated admiration for former President Roosevelt by administration officials, the Trump administration has cumulatively removed or initiated removal of protections for more than 100 million acres of public lands across both terms—more than one-third of the amount of land that President Roosevelt protected. Among his accomplishments, Roosevelt is known for creating the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and protecting 150 million acres of national forests. Comparatively, Trump’s repeal of the Roadless Rule revokes protections for about one-third of that acreage of national forests.

President Roosevelt also signed into law the Antiquities Act of 1906, enabling presidential designation of national monuments. Soon after, he designated 18 national monuments, including Chaco Canyon, Muir Woods, and the Grand Canyon. Meanwhile, Trump has pushed for drilling around Chaco Culture National Historical Park, erased Indigenous history at Muir Woods, and targeted protected landscapes surrounding the Grand Canyon. Trump’s unprecedented erasure of national monument protections in his first term, along with an ongoing effort to target national monuments, puts him out of step with every past president, particularly Roosevelt.

With the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, any presidential comparison the administration makes is a clear farce. Secretary Burgum recently touted: “This is the first presidential library that you could hike to, ride a mountain bike to, and, yes, there is a way placed right in front of the library to tie up your horse if you decide to ride a horse.” Yet, as recently reported by Republic, Trump’s BLM has auctioned off the rights to drill the public lands that include the Maah Daah Hey Trail, the very trail that enables hiking and riding access to the new presidential library. With the library’s opening and the broader attention that parks will receive from America 250, the Trump administration will have a tough job explaining how its actions stack up against the nation’s long-standing, bipartisan pride in its public lands.

Conclusion

No other president has come close to President Trump’s record of destruction across the country’s public lands, with more than 86 million acres of protections targeted in just the past year and a half. Rather than upholding and building on the conservation values exemplified by Theodore Roosevelt and other American leaders, President Trump has moved in the opposite direction. If left to stand, the Trump administration’s actions to erase millions of acres of protections will permanently alter entire landscapes and impede future generations’ enjoyment of the country’s public lands and waters. This July Fourth, Americans will reflect on what elements of the country’s history and legacy should be preserved and carried forward into the next 250 years. Restoring a legacy of land conservation should be high on that list.

The authors would like to thank Jenny Rowland-Shea, Drew McConville, Frances Colón, Jamie Friedman, Steve Bonitatibus, Anh Nguyen, and Nicole Piper for their contributions to this article.

Methodology

For a full detailed methodology, click here.